1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present disclosure relate to the field of power supplies of electronic devices, and more particularly to a system and method for testing redundancy and hot-swapping capability of a redundant power supply.
2. Description of Related Art
To provide reliable service to system users, computers must be designed with a goal of minimum system downtime and maximum system availability. Because the failure of key components can lead to a loss of system availability, many key components, such as power supplies, are designed to provide redundant capacity. Thus the power supplies still provide normal operation of a computer system even in the event of a component failure. For example, a redundant power supply may include two separate power supplies, each capable of powering a computer system individually. Under normal operation, both power supplies are operable to share power load, with each power supply operable to provide half a required power of the computer system. However, in the event of failure or removal of one of the power supplies, the other power supply is operable to provide full power to the computer system.
To further minimize system downtime, key components in the computer system may be designed to be hot-swappable. Hot-swapping is a method for removing or replacing a component of the computer system without shutting down or restarting the computer system, thereby providing computer system availability even as the computer system is being serviced or repaired. In a computer system that provides hot-swappable redundant power supplies, one of the power supplies may be removed and serviced while the remaining power supply continues to power the computer system.
In order to ensure that the computer system is in a proper operation state, a manufacturer must manually test redundancy and hot-swap capability of a redundant power supply after the redundant power supply has been installed in the computer system. Such manual testing is inefficient and costly, and may not provide reliable results because of human errors.
What is needed, therefore, is a system and method for testing redundancy and hot-swapping capability of a redundant power supply, which can automatically switch power supplies to test the redundant capacity and hot-swap of the redundant power supply by utilizing a switch fixture instead of a manual test, so as to increase the test efficiency and improve the accuracy of the test results.